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PREFACE:
If buildings make people, as the numerous studies in this book suggest, then it is the writing about these buildings that in turn endeavors to make up what is generally human, its condition, and its infinite creative complexity.
This book, therefore, is not a comprehensive survey, which would be impossible to encompass meaningfully within one volume. I defer to other colleagues whom I have learned from for thorough summaries of the arc of anthropologically infl ected studies of architectural form.
Indispensable sources are Paul Oliver’s magisterial multivolume work (1997); the vast output of the journal Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, published by the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments; Suzanne Preston Blier’s state-of-the-art survey in Tilley et al. (2006); Setha Low and Denise Lawrence Zúñiga’s (2003) review of the anthropological and wider literature pertaining to the study of house forms; the reviews of both Mike Parker Pearson and Colin Richards (1994) as well as Ross Samson (1990) of architecture within archaeology; Claire Melhuish’s cross-disciplinary exploration of architects and anthropologists (1996); Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence Zúñiga’s edited volume on Europe (1999); and Trevor Marchand’s (2009) ethnography of mud brick construction.
All of these works must be consulted for a more wide ranging discussion of the scope of architectural studies relevant to anthropology.
Rather, this book aims to engage with the more specific question of the materiality of built form in its various material registers (Th rift 2005).
The emphasis on material register is an attempt to understand architectonic and architectural forms in particular, not merely in terms of immediate empirically evident material form as an assemblage of certain kinds of building materials such as wood, concrete, or mud or building techniques such as mass industrialized housing or mud brick but in terms of how architectonic forms might be understood additionally in different registers such as image, metaphor, performance, ruin, diagnostic, or symbol and how the specific material conditions of these registers their materiality enables human relations.
In short, how does the materiality of built form in its great variety make people and society?
What does the materiality of built form in its various material registers do socially? As abstracted concept? As lived building? As metaphor? As mind, as sign, as environmental adaptation, as fossil, as performance, as ruin, as iteration, as destroyed object, as image, as flow and movement? Toward the engagement with these issues, this book—beginning with this introduction and ending with a postscript is organized as follows.
Chapter 1, “The Long Nineteenth Century,” examines the currents in eighteenth- and nineteenth century thought and anthropological practice that have influenced the anthropological analysis of architecture.
It charts the development of thought starting from the work of the Abbé Laugier and his primitivist fantasies, Pitt Rivers, Gustav Semper, and Lewis Henry Morgan, to the rise of postwar vernacular studies in the mid-twentieth century. In particular it examines the prevailing “fossil metaphor” characterizing understandings of architecture and material culture.
It considers how these investigations served to demonstrate the nineteenth-century concept of the “psychic unity of man” and inspired later modernist ideals and the material terms by which social reform (notably Marxist) could be imagined.
Following the waning of material culture studies and architecture in the wake of early-twentieth-century social anthropology’s preoccupation with social structure, the chapter examines the theoretical disengagement with architectural form and material culture and then charts its reemergence and reconstitution with new effects in the postwar period.
Th is period represents a radical update of earlier approaches. It is here that we see the return of nineteenth century linguistic analogies with the “linguistic turn” and the rise of structuralism and the recurrent understanding of architecture as an aspect of mind.
The question of why such a renewed focus should emerge is asked in relation to changes in postwar social life and the new meanings architectural questions pose for anthropological thought.
This chapter identifies those enduring themes of universalism and modernization, which still frame (as well as obscure) debates in the present.
In Chapter 2, “Architecture and Archaeology,” archaeology is discussed as that traditional subfield of anthropology that has concerned itself most emphatically with the study of material culture and architecture in particular.
Especially within the area of ethno archaeology emerging from the New Archaeology of the postwar period, the interface between people, material culture, and architecture assumed a renewed methodological and theoretical significance for the study of society.
This chapter examines this tradition along with postprocessual responses to the New Archaeology.
Beginning with the reevaluation of nineteenth century evolutionary theories, this chapter examines how these trends within archaeology introduced a new dimension to the understanding of mind, cognition, and representation over the long term that is distinctive from ethnographic approaches and the “ethnographic snapshot.” Such an approach emphasizes the deep-time perspective that archaeology enables and that allows us to consider the radically different ways material registers can change and function over time.
In particular, the significance of archaeology’s understanding of the changes associated with the rise of the Neolithic and enduring built forms are discussed when sedentism and agriculture emerge, resulting in changed social relations and new material forms of dwelling.
Similarly, archaeology’s engagement with deep time and culture change enabled the imagination of radically new modern forms of architecture to facilitate social reform as well as determine the condition of “basic needs” at the heart of wider developmental and modernization discourses.
Later poststructuralist approaches emphasizing performance and the iterative nature of architectural forms over time suggested a shift from a fossil metaphor to a palimpsest metaphor, shifting the focus to what architectural forms dorather than represent and their attendant changing material registers over time.
